Swedish police want personal info of P2P users (Updated)

Swedish law enforcement would like to be able to get personal information on …

Law enforcement in Sweden is pushing for the power to get personal information on file sharers who are guilty of lesser copyright offenses. Sweden's police are reportedly preparing to send a report to the Ministry of Justice tomorrow that will request changes to the law so that police can pursue cases beyond those that would warrant prison time, allowing them to gain access to P2P users' phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and more.

Under current Swedish law, law enforcement is only allowed to obtain personal information on accused copyright bandits whose criminal offenses would be enough to warrant a two-year or longer prison sentence. However, a new file sharing bill is being proposed in Sweden that would relax the rules and allow the police to go after those suspected of lesser copyright crimes.

As reported by The Local, critics of the proposed bill fear that it could be abused to pursue fairly (or completely) innocent Internet users, but proponents of the bill claim that Sweden's copyright law will only be strengthened. The report apparently suggests that a court order should be required of police during preliminary investigations, which could prevent the law from being abused.

The proposed changes to the law are undoubtedly meant to target high-profile P2P sites like The Pirate Bay, which is based in Sweden and has been steadily growing since its inception. As of November of 2008, The Pirate Bay announced that it had 22 million active peers, up from 12 million in April of the same year. Swedish law enforcement has been working on ways to prosecute those behind the site for years, but has thus far been relatively unsuccessful. Swedish police raided the site in 2006 and confiscated a number of servers, but authorities still have nothing to show for it.

Though the proposal may not directly help prosecutors make progress against The Pirate Bay's administrators, it may help them intimidate users of the popular torrent tracker. After all, if users are seen seeding things like prerelease music albums and movies in the hundreds or thousands, police may be able to access that user's ISP records and send nastygrams, or worse.

Update: Some of our very helpful Swedish readers have contacted us to elaborate a bit on the proposed bill. The law, which will be based on the EU's IPRED directive, may allow copyright holders themselves who are already investigating users on their own to obtain a court order and get personal information out of the ISPs. They would then be able to make direct contact with the accused users and threaten them with lawsuits. If things move forward with the bill as planned, it could go into effect as early as April 1.